Whale of a Journey

CTMH New Baby

I spent the weekend working on a special order for a set of Thank You cards. It was quite a journey of creativity. SO this will be a LONG blog - LOL!

The request was to include whales, navy and lime green, so I made 3 samples to play with the stamp first.

The adorable whale is from the CTMH New Baby set. 

CARD #1

It was difficult finding a good patterned paper for navy and lime -- WITHOUT using Later Sk8r for a change :). I settled for a Nice stripe from the DCWV My Sunshine stack.  My DH showed me how to make an angled cut with my paper trimmer. [give me a comment if you would like to see a tutorial]

First Try

I heat-embossed the whale on a tag cut with the Cricut Artiste Cartridge. 

The background paper is dry embossed and I layered 2 borders on the side.  The sentiment is from the For A Friend stamp set.

CTMH For A Friend

I liked including a nautical looking ribbon, (Michael's package of Navy Melodies & Lace ribbons) but something was just lacking. Mr. Whale was floating all by himself, and I didn't care for the scalloped borders -- even though they suggested water. 
CARD #2

2nd Sample

Frustrated by my sad 1st attempt, I searched splitcoaststampers for whales. This card is a straight up CASE from Hazel.  [Thanks, Hazel!] 
(http://www.splitcoaststampers.com/gallery/photo/2310200?&si=Hazeltje)


I used a rick-rack stamp from a Hot off the Press set, Stamped Stitches, in Juniper Exclusive Ink as my water. 

The sentiment is from a stamp set bundled with the exclusive CTMH Cricut Artiste cartridge. Word Balloons, but I actually <gasp> cut the word out of the balloon to use it independently.

Mr. Whale is heat-embossed with Blue embossing powder and colored with a gray watercolor pencil and a blending pen.

It was way cute, but I had NOT successfully used Navy and Lime Green -- it was only hinted at in the striped paper. 

CARD #3

3rd Time's a Charm

I had a TON of triangles from my angled cutting that only produced 3 straight strips...so what could I do with them? This time, I changed the background paper to Outdoor Denim to get a strong navy "anchor" to the design. (LOL). I dry-embossed it with a chevron embossing folder.

I used a piece of Later Sk8r -- couldn't resist, it's a great lime color -- as the background for stamping Mr. Whale, and heat-embossed and fussy-cut several.

I then used the same rick-rack stamp to create the water, but added one row in Pear ink. I stamped just Mr. Whale's head and spout in Versamark on White Daisy cardstock and heat-embossed it in blue so I could position the cut-out whale on top of it. The whale scene is layered on Pear cardstock with punched rounded edges.

 Mr. Whale looked lonely, so I added a cloud -- which I cut at 1" from Pear cardstock using the Artiste Cartridge, and gave some surface touch-up using one of the stamps in Distressed Backgrounds with Outdoor Denim ink. Then, I realized that you can't just have a cloud -- how about a sun?  The shape that coordinates with the April Stamp of the Month, My Sunshine, can be cut at 1" to make a tiny little sun outline -- PERFECT!!!  I cut it in half to get the most out of my 8 little suns.


The banner sentiment is from the Word Balloons set, layered with Pear cardstock. But, again, it looked lonely.  

Back to the New Baby set, and it has an adorable starfish. I heat-embossed several, colored them with watercolor pencils in lime green, and fussy-cut them all. (they are very small)

The finished set!

I moved the positioning of the nautical knot, and was VERY pleased with the results.

It seems my biggest challenge is to make clean and simple cards -- they always seem to need more to me. Although I LOVED the CASE on my second example, it just seems plain. I just want to add more...

All that was left was to assemble 10 of them.  While doing so, I had an adhesive FAIL, which forced a LOT of re-work. 

So stay tuned for more information about adhesives!

Thank you for stopping by and staying long enough to read this Moby Dick of a tale.

....and I do not even OWN the CTMH pun stamp set...wonder why?


I also entered this in the SplitCoastStampers TLC435 Angled Background Challenge.